Keith Jacobshagen-Painter

"The Picture Show, presenting Nebraska artists in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska."

[NARRATOR] "Keith Jacobshagen, a native of Wichita, Kansas, has lived for the past twenty years in Nebraska. He is widely known for his big sky paintings of the Midwest."[Keith Jacobshagen] "Yeah, it's the sky that attracts me. Sure. I have a specific area in which I'll go to and I'll just wander around in that area and paintings seem to sort of reveal themselves to me. So I'll go out and I'll make a drawing or I'll make some watercolors and I'll go back to the studio and I'll make some oil paintings from the drawings and watercolors, or I'll come back out and make an oil painting. And I'll just move around within a very, very small radius really, and paint around a specific area for awhile. Sort of probing it and looking at it and... I guess listening to it."
[NARRATOR] "In the 1970's the Sheldon Gallery acquired Havelock Elevator."
[Keith Jacobshagen] "That was a period of time in which I was doing a lot of work in the elevators. That elevator especially because it was right on the edge of town and I loved that... the business of the elevator sort of being a kind of beacon of human habitation. Something more than just the isolation of the farm. And I painted that elevator... I probably have painted it twenty-five to thirty times.I'm interested in repetition. One learns through repetition each time you repeat something you're actually changing it.There's a never-ending supply of ideas and energy out here. It changes every second... every minute. I continually come back to the land and I continually come back to the whole business of living in an agrarian society and... It's something that's extremely important to me."